Robot follows the rules of the road

This is a fantastic high school project. [Shmendrik213] built and robot a programmed it to follow common traffic rules. The robot drives itself with a DC motor, using one servo for steering and another to pan a webcam back and forth. The netbook that comes along for the ride is running a VB.NET program that can detect an upcoming intersection, read the street sign, and react based on other cars currently at the intersection.

The hardware is running on an Altera processor using firmware programmed in VHDL. We remember building a tissue box holder for one of our high school projects. Looks like the times have changed since then.

Glad I’m not the only one that noticed. Also shown, is that it scans the intersection for cars. If it finds one, it will start all over again. So it seems more like it will only go if there aren’t any other cars.

Seems like a great start, but the analysis certainly needs to be sped up for practicality.